Why Was a Climate Activist Put in Prison for Five Years?

The London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital. If you live in the city, it’s the road you might take to the airport, or the suburbs, or the countryside, and it provides a kind of unofficial border to the Greater London Area. Also provided: lots of traffic. Every day, the road plays host to some two hundred thousand vehicles. It is sometimes jokingly referred to as “the nation’s largest car park.” Had you been cruising along the M25 in mid-November, 2022, you might have encountered a particularly stubborn delay. For four consecutive days, dozens of activists from the British environmental group Just Stop Oil climbed onto and occupied the gantries, or bridges, overlooking the highway, forcing the police to halt traffic. Drat!

Perhaps understandably, people were upset. In the Mail Online, and elsewhere, they raged. “Just Stop Oil eco-mob face jail as 35 are arrested for holding motorists up for FIVE HOURS and ‘blocking an ambulance’ on the M25,” one headline read. The government issued a statement denouncing the action as “criminal activity.” In an emotional video filmed from one of the gantries, a young activist said that they were demanding that the U.K. stop issuing new oil and gas licenses. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she said. “And you might hate me for doing this, and you’re entitled to hate me, but I wish you would direct all that anger and hatred at our government.” Below her, trucks roared past. “How many more people have to say ‘We don’t have a liveable future if you continue licensing oil and gas’ for you to listen? Why does it take young people like me, up on a fucking gantry on the M25, for you to listen?”

This past July, at a two-and-a-half-week trial at Southwark crown court in London, five Just Stop Oil activists faced charges of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” for their roles in organizing the M25 action. The defendants—Roger Hallam, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, Cressida Gethin, Louise Lancaster, and Daniel Shaw—had not themselves been up on the gantries. Rather, they had spoken on a Zoom call trying to recruit volunteers. During the trial, the judge, Christopher Hehir, was not very sympathetic. He did not allow the jury to consider evidence about the climate breakdown. Instead, he labelled the defendants “fanatic[s].” “You have appointed yourselves as the sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change, bound neither by the principles of democracy nor the rule of law,” he said. After the jury reached a guilty verdict, he handed down some of the harshest sentences for nonviolent protest in the U.K.’s history: four years in prison for most of the defendants, and five years for Hallam. (His case went up for appeal at the end of January; a decision is expected soon.) “Today marks a dark day for peaceful environmental protest, the protection of environmental defenders and indeed anyone concerned with the exercise of their fundamental freedoms in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,” Michel Forst, a human-rights specialist at the U.N., wrote in a statement.

“Occupational hazard, you might say,” Hallam told me, recently. He was speaking over the phone from H.M.P. Wayland, a men’s prison in Norfolk, northeast of London, where he had been serving out his sentence. (I was calling from my son’s room, which is also my office. To the extent that we were having drinks together, I had a mug of tea nearby.) Hallam’s lengthy sentence may reflect the fact that he is a co-founder of Just Stop Oil, and also of the British environmental groups Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion. He has been arrested many times. When I asked him to describe his surroundings, he said, “The cell is fine, basically. I mean, for my purposes. Painted magnolia, it’s got a single bed, it’s got a little desk, it’s got some shelving. There’s a loo in the cell, and a sink, and if you want to go for a shower that’s down the corridor.” Hallam is fifty-eight; many of the people on his corridor were also on the older side. He went for a run once a day, and collected his food in the mornings and evenings. “I mean, it’s a bit like being in a monastery,” he said. “There’s not that much to say from an exciting, consumerist point of view.” Mainly, he had been reading and writing. He had just finished Iain McGilchrist’s fifteen-hundred-page neuroscience tome, “The Matter with Things.” “Being a bit of the intellectual type, I’m actually having quite a nice time,” he told me. “Which probably doesn’t fit in with the default story line on these sorts of things.”

Hallam, who is tall and stern-looking, with a long face and gray hair he pulls into a bun, is skeptical of default story lines in general. He is skeptical of the media, the government, and corporations. He believes that society as we know it will collapse in the next decade, as large swaths of the planet become uninhabitable. Hallam explains this to me with a sense of urgency, punctuated by dark jokes, and an incredulousness that we all continue to live as we do. For many, this tone is off-putting—his brand of activism is unpopular with the British public—but for others it’s electric. Hallam has persuaded doctors, lawyers, teachers, grandparents, students, and many more to participate in climate protests of varying degrees of radicalism. He has encouraged many people to break the law. Under the banner of Extinction Rebellion, or XR, activists have staged a mock burial of the future and carried giant skeletons through London’s streets. They’ve installed a pink party boat near Oxford Circus, stopped trains, and superglued their hands to buildings. Activists for Just Stop Oil, which favors more disruptive tactics designed to shock, have thrown soup at Van Gogh paintings and spray-painted Charles Darwin’s grave.

These actions are not to everyone’s taste, but they have arguably made an impact. XR was founded in 2018, with three demands, the first of which was that the government “tell the truth” about the environment. In 2019, after several days of XR protests, and more than a thousand arrests, the U.K. became the first country to formally declare a climate emergency. Public support swelled; celebrities including Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry spoke out in favor of the group. Then things started to splinter. Hallam, though a celebrated co-founder, was now at the radical edge of the group, advocating for mass arrests as a way to show resistance. (“My view is if you’re not in prison, you’re not in resistance,” he told a film crew for the documentary “Rebellion.”) He also had a habit of making sweeping generalizations that got him into trouble in the press. “He’s got a lot of integrity and charisma, but not a lot of detail,” Farhana Yamin, a longtime environmental lawyer, has said. Eventually, XR issued a statement distancing itself from Hallam, and he turned his attention to other organizations including Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil.

Hallam’s activities have taken place against a backdrop of tightening restrictions on climate activism across the U.K. In 2022, the then Conservative government passed the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act, which gave the police broader powers to shut down protests. This past May, Lord Walney, an adviser on political violence for the previous government, compared activist groups including Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action to terrorist organizations and suggested that they should be banned. When I spoke with Oscar Berglund, a senior lecturer who studies climate activism at the University of Bristol, he told me that Hallam’s sentence was unusually long. “Before this past year, there hadn’t really been long sentences for civil-disobedience activists like that,” he said. Berglund’s research has found evidence of a “global crackdown.” In the U.K., the courts have tried to remove activists’ “right to even talk about climate change in front of the jury,” he said. (Juries are often sympathetic, once they hear an activist’s reasoning.) Hallam was reprimanded when he tried to discuss the climate, and was not allowed to introduce into evidence a fifteen-page statement from the climate scientist Bill McGuire, the author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide.” The restrictions on what can be said in defense of an activist’s actions are an attempt to “depoliticize what are political trials,” Berglund said.